A Sneak Peek into Saheki’s Secret Layers

This picture from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter is of Saheki Crater, about 84 kilometers across, and located in a Southern highlands of Mars, to a north of Hellas Planitia. It’s filled with pleasing alluvial fans that shaped when H2O (likely melting snow) carried excellent material, such as sand, sediment and mud, from a interior void edge down to a bottom of a crater.

Two smaller craters impacted into a alluvial fan aspect in Saheki, excavating holes that concede us to see what a fans demeanour like underneath a surface. Exposed along a crater’s interior walls, we can see that a fan is done adult of mixed particular layers (white and purple tones in a extended tone image) that were deposited on a building (the immature and brownish-red tones). The brown, round shapes on a fan layers are tiny impact craters.

This is a stereo span with ESP_049528_1585.

The map is projected here during a scale of 25 centimeters (9.8 inches) per pixel. [The strange picture scale is 26.2 centimeters (10.3 inches) per pixel (with 1 x 1 binning); objects on a sequence of 78 centimeters (30.7 inches) opposite are resolved.] North is up.